It seems like this approach (including the major version number in the package name) has been practiced at the distro level for a long time. E.g. SDL 1.2 vs 2.

It seems like this approach (including the major version number in the package name) has been practiced at the distro level for a long time. E.g. SDL 1.2 vs 2.0 have distinct package names on every distro I'm aware of.